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<Paper uid="W98-0304">
  <Title>Representing temporal discourse markers for generation purposes</Title>
  <Section position="7" start_page="27" end_page="27" type="concl">
    <SectionTitle>
5 Conclusion and Outlook
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> Temporal markers have neither received much attention in NLG, nor has a principled account of marker selection as such been introduced. In this paper we presented a general framework for representing German temporal markers for generation purposes.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> We identified some of the features required to describe applicability conditions, constraints and preferences, and proposed a declarative lexical resource that makes it possible to treat temporal markers and other linguistic means as mutual constraints at the sentence planning stage. Now, we need to examine individual temporal markers more closely and incorporate the temporal marker lexicon into a text generation system.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> For the purpose Of this paper, we have assumed that temporal relations are always explicitly signalled, and thus limited our study to marker selection. Marker occurrence, however, is an important issue. First, Hitzeman et al. (1995) argue that there exist temporal defaults of the kind &amp;quot;An event will occur just after a preceding event&amp;quot;; this renders the introduction of explicit markers superfluous. Second, we have only assumed pairs of time-stamped expressions, but have ignored that they usually occur in a larger discourse situation where other kinds of coherence relations might hold between events. For instance, all causal coherence relations have some temporal implicature; still, one does not want a temporal marker to signal a VOLITIONAL-CAUSE, even though cause and effect are temporally related.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="3"> Finally, future work needs to address the interaction of marker choice and temporal adverbs, as these are the means to realize the simple/progressive distinction in German.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="4"> Acknowledgement Thanks to Manfred Stede and two anonymous reviewers for helpful comments on earlier versions of this paper.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
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